Post-earthquake planning occurred in Skopje in a specific context. The Republic of Macedonia was then part of a Socialist Federation whose urban policy – even if different from that of the Soviet Union – shared some common characteristics with it. The existence of a distinctively socialist city has been much debated (French and Hamilton, 1973; Smith, 1996), but we can at least recognise the existence of a set of principles and norms guiding urban planning and architecture in socialist countries. Whereas most Western cities planned to increase their open space and decrease the density of population after 1945, socialist guidelines supported the image of a compact city, with high-rise buildings and almost no suburbanisation (Häussermann, 1996). The absence of private property and the concentration of investments in the hand of the state made socialist urban planning unique in the contemporary world. State-led central and hierarchical organisation was also the rule for any planning decisions: the state was in charge of urban planning and of all the means to implement it.
Centralist conceptions of socialism were reflected in the urban layout, with the city centre becoming a major focal point, although in a very different manner than in capitalist cities, where business dominated. Socialist planning conceived the centre, not as an area of retail concentration, but as a political, cultural and administrative place (Fisher, 1962), in which architecture was to support state power. The role of urban ‘art’ and design was to portray the victory of socialism. The homogeneous structure of the centre also aimed at showing the team spirit at work in socialist countries, as opposed to the fragmented capitalist community (Haüssermann, 1996). This explains why socialist cities were conceived according to a clear order and a hierarchy between axes of development, central squares and monumental enclosures. Streets were to ‘belong to the people’, but the vast boulevards and squares were designed for parades and demonstrations; through such functionalism would socialist values be imprinted onto urban society.
Cities were regarded by authorities as the focal points for the realisation of ‘socialist modernity’ from which stemmed the goal of a classless society (Sailer-Fliege, 1999). In order for all the inhabitants to have an equal access to the ‘socialist way of life’, urban uniformity was the rule. There was to be no spatial segregation of different classes and groups. These theoretical principles were materialised by the adoption of operational norms in planning, including the standardisation of ‘living space’. Each town had a pre-defined ‘proper’ size and the city itself was divided into self-contained units. These ‘neighbourhoods’ were the most basic element of socialist cities, which also rested upon the establishment of norms in terms of housing. Within such guidelines, visible social divisions in urban space were thought of as being a symbol of the past.
Yet, how was the pre-socialist legacy taken into account by socialist planners? As a reminder of capitalist conditions – assumed to have been overcome – the pre-1945 buildings were, following the urban renewal logic, usually planned for demolition. However, the basic structure of the socialist city described by French and Hamilton (1979) reveals a quite different reality, with the maintenance of an historical core and elements of the previous capitalist period in the city centre. In many cities, pre-war buildings characterised by low living standards remained – a situation likely to generate some cracks in the apparently smooth socialist urban machinery. The issue of pre-1945 dwellings and their maintenance despite the planning guidelines shows how segregation found a breach and made its appearance in socialist cities. Confronted by a perpetual shortage of housing, urban authorities had no other choice than to temporarily keep the decaying pre-war buildings, which constituted a poor-quality housing stock for elderly of immigrant households (Sailer-Fliege, 1999). This break in the seemingly non- negotiable egalitarian ideals of socialism was, however, not unique and larger cases of residential differentiation were discernible in a great majority of Eastern European cities.
Drawing from Szelenyi’s (1983) analysis of inequality in socialist cities and from the typology of socio-economic and spatial differentiation established by Smith (1996) in the case of Soviet cities, it is possible to infer that such cases of segregation were not absent from Eastern European urban centres either. Socialist cities were divided into various kinds of districts, defined by their location and status. First, white- collar workers and members of the nomenklatura were to be found in high-status areas of good housing and easy access to service provision, with, second, migrants and
manual workers in old and deteriorating housing, or with a low service provision. It is thus hard to deny the reality of social and spatial differentiation in socialist cities. In analysing such patterns, Szelenyi (1983) differentiated inequalities inherited from the capitalist past from new, emerging, inequalities, which arose logically from the socialist system of production and distribution. Housing inequalities were thus created by the very mechanism that was meant to replace and reverse unequalising market allocation – socialist administrative allocation. Indeed, multiple inequalities were present in urban life, affecting the size and quality of living space; the type of tenure and period of construction; the public or private character of housing (with the latter very often made up of poor material and confined to fringes, small town or countryside); the quality of service provision; and the time lag between the construction of housing blocks and related services.
The state had a major part in the failure to achieve urban uniformity (Hamilton, 1993, cf. Smith, 1996). While the housing allocation system was officially considered a right for every inhabitant, it was also a privilege and reward for specific categories of citizens. Both the nomenklatura and the intelligentsia could benefit from higher-status districts or housings. Quotas for companies, public organisations and administration determined the number of people who could benefit from better quality housing (Häussermann, 1996). Referring to the Yugoslav case, Fisher (1962) noted the increasing development of socially distinct areas, ‘upper-class ghettos’ reserved for the top-layer of the party. Because Yugoslavia’s upper classes could not afford to pay higher rents in luxury housing, the latter received more state subsidies than standard housing did (Szelenyi, 1983).
To complete this ostensibly paradoxical image of inequality in a society built on supposedly egalitarian ideals, we should not forget the issue of ethnic segregation. Social and economic differentiation in capitalist cities often takes on an ethnic or racial dimension, but was this the case for socialist cities? Unfortunately, not many authors have explored this point, especially in Eastern Europe and ex-Yugoslavia, where urban ethnic segregation has been studied even less than in the Soviet Union. A small number of authors have focused on Central Asian cities, where the evidence of ethnic spatial differentiation under socialism could not be denied (Smith, 1996). It seems that this question was an even greater taboo than the one of social segregation during socialism. As I will show, in Skopje, this issue was hushed up rather than tackled head-on.
We should not overestimate the extent of segregation in socialist cities. In most cases, the majority of inhabitants had similar standards of living and, because of the absence of huge gaps that could have divided them, social and spatial segregation was less marked than in capitalist cities (Häussermann, 1996). This conclusion is shared by Smith (1996), although the author rather emphasises the difference of character between such phenomena as they appear in the West or the East. Broad spatial differentiations and inequalities in occupational status, housing or education among urban dwellers did exist, but they were found in medium-sized and large cities rather than in small centres. Their extent also varied a lot depending on the city’s history and the survival of pre-war housing and state housing enclaves. Residential sorting could be expected where distinctive ethnic groups were present, and where family structures differed a lot. Finally, once residential segregation became established, it seems to have been a reinforcing rather than disappearing phenomenon. If by ‘urban uniformity’ we mean the truly classless distribution of the population in urban space without any regard to their economic or political status, then this ideal was certainly not obtained in socialist cities. I now examine in more detail the issue of Skopje and analyse the impact of socialist planning on the city’s division tendencies.